He declared that he had found you.

The Owlman. Wayne. Gotham’s emperor, the mastermind behind the Crime Syndicate, the city and its dark sovereign.

Your impossible-to-please master.

He carelessly scattered bait to nurture you, letting you grow in his palm like a flower, a vine, a bird, slowly unfurling until your body could bear the jewels he whimsically draped over you. Until you, too, seemed to merge with the dim and suffocating manor, your meticulously cultivated innocence adorning his kingdom of schemes and blood.

“Little girl,” he’d murmur, throne carved from gargoyle-black marble cradling his lean frame. His cloak—Kevlar masquerading as velvet—brushed your cheek, smelling of gunmetal and bergamot. The title hung between you, sweet and venomous as arsenic-laced honey. You learned to measure his moods by the slant of his fountain pen: when it paused mid-sentence, when ink bled through parchment like a wound, you’d count the hours until dawn brought news of a mayor’s drowned mistress or a dockside massacre.

His touch was winter moonlight sliding down your spine—not cruel, not kind, merely present. Fingers tracing your vertebrae as one might absently toy with a pocket watch chain, his attention devoured police reports while you were perching on his lap, a vase awaiting flowers. In those moments, you wondered if even Gotham’s skyline mattered to him beyond its utility as a chessboard, if the screams rising from Crime Alley were merely faint scratches on vinyl to his ears. You became certain of one truth: he loved nothing, not the city writhing beneath his boots, not the dagger-sharp legacy of Wayne, least of all the ghost-girl he’d dressed in silk and taught to parrot his lies.

Yet when he tilted your chin toward the chandelier’s sulfurous glow, inspecting his handiwork, you glimpsed it—a flicker in those glacier eyes, something ravenous and wounded. Not affection. Not even hunger. The look of a man admiring his own reflection in a knife’s edge.